Shares of Apple Inc. (ticker: AAPL) hit new all-time highs this week after its most famous investor gave the stock a huge vote of confidence over the weekend. At Berkshire Hathaway’s (BRK.A, BRK.B) annual shareholder meeting in Omaha, billionaire value investor and Berkshire CEO Warren Buffett discussed upping Berkshire’s stake in Apple in the first quarter of 2017.
After the market close on Friday, Berkshire’s latest filings revealed Buffett has more than doubled the company’s investment in Apple from $7.1 billion at the end of 2016 to $19.2 billion as of March 31.
Apple recently reported disappointing first-quarter iPhone sales ahead of the highly anticipated release of its 10-year anniversary iPhone model later this year. In a new interview, Buffett said he isn’t concerned about quarter-by-quarter fluctuations.
“I don’t own it because of what I think the earnings are going to be the next three months or six months. It’s very hard to figure out how much people delay their buying of iPhones because of the launch of a new one in six months,” Buffett said.
Instead, Buffett praised Apple’s aggressive share buyback plan and said the iPhone is a “very, very, very valuable product to people that build their lives around it.”
Following Monday’s session, Apple’s market capitalization now rests at more than $810 billion. Apple has expanded its lead as the world’s largest public company over its closest rivals Alphabet (GOOG) (GOOGL) and Microsoft Corp. (MSFT), which have market caps of $651 billion and $533 billion, respectively.
At the shareholder meeting, Buffett, who famously shunned tech stocks for many years, admitted he missed huge opportunities by not investing in Alphabet subsidiary Google and Amazon.com (AMZN) years ago.
Despite Apple’s massive size, Buffett clearly sees…
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